The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s was the cultural subsect of the Black Power Movement, focusing on the creation of music, literature, drama, and various visual arts by Black artists and intellectuals. Participants of the Black Arts Movement shared similar ideologies of self-determination and Black pride, creating art in direct response to the Black community’s struggle for rights and liberation in 1960s-1970s America. Author and activist Cheryl Clarke writes in her novel After Mecca: Women Poets and The Black Arts Movement that:

Black women were key poets, theorists, and revolutionists during the era of the new black consciousness movement of the late twentieth century, but they had been integral voices since the time when Phillis Wheatley (1774) and Maria M. Stewart (1832) claimed the public and intellectual spheres for African women in North America (Clarke, Cheryl. After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. Rutgers University Press, 2006).

The emergence and subsequent prominence of Black poetry was pioneered by women like Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Lucille Clifton. For these writers,

poetry was a principal instrument of political education about the new blackness […] the experimentalism of new black poetry, its critique of Western canonical constructions, its revision of African American literary and cultural conventions, and its visionary salience set it apart from the work of the previous generation (Clarke, Cheryl.